Mission Improbable

Today is my 17th wedding anniversary. We lived together for 5 years before we eventually made it legal, aside from my few spells in hospital over the years we have never spent more than 2 nights apart. I've known my lovely husband for more than half my life and I cannot happily visualise life without him.

We met a month before my 17th birthday in a pub called The Forest which sadly is no longer a pub but a large private house. On that fateful day we had both been dragged up there by our respective best friends against our wills. His best mate had wanted to introduce him to my best mate but fate intervened.

He was (and still is) a biker, not the grubby grebo kind of biker, instead he was a cleancut lad who happened to only have one mode of transport - a Honda 250 Superdream. I loved his cheeky grin and twinkly blue eyes framed by gorgeous long eyelashes. He still has the blue eyes of course but the cheeky grin with its slightly crooked teeth has been replaced by some dodgy crowns of which he is very self-conscious and now he rarely smiles.

I don't know what he liked about me. I was wearing some white trousers which used to be my karate trousers but I managed to convert them into day wear. As it was the mid 80s I was also wearing my New Romantic navy blue boots that had zips that curved from the front of the foot round to the outside of the calf - I had used some pink ribbon to make little bows and tied them to the zip-pull. I thought it looked cool but probably I looked like a dork. On top I was wearing an almost backless teal sweater. Like I said, it was the 80s - no-one ever made fashion sense in the 80's.

My 'friend' did her best to distract his attention and wore his leather jacket and basically draped herself over him as often as she could while I contented myself with squirting a soda siphon into a little gremlin charity money box, convinced that I was going to be left on the shelf again. But apparently he only had eyes for me.

When it was time to go home we didn't exchange phone numbers or make plans to see each other again and I thought that was that. However, the next night I was on my way up to my friend's house when I heard a bike pull up next to me and it was him!! We stood and chatted for over an hour in the pouring rain - all the time he kept his helmet on because he'd been down at the burger van eating burgers with raw onion and he didn't want me to smell his breath. He told me he was on his way home to watch, wait for it, Dynasty! Once again we parted company without making any plans.

The next day I decided to look up his phone number and give him a call but he wasn't in when I called. I went out for a jog in the woods feeling like an idiot for calling and when I was on my way back I saw in the distance someone walking up the road with a Golden Labrador. Thinking it was my unpleasant next door neighbour I started walking away as fast as I could but fortunately not fast enough because it turned out to be my future soulmate walking his boss' dog, Solomon, trying to find my house. He came home with me so I could wash and change and then we went out for a walk together. The rest as they say is history.

I cannot fathom how we have managed to stay together so long because we are so different. He's a leg man, I have limbs that can only loosely be described as legs. I like tall men, he's the same height as me. I like kissing, he likes to get right on down to business. He's a clean & tidy freak, I'm the world's worst housekeeper. I like to cook hearty meals from scratch, he likes something frozen and out of a packet. He is Yin to my Yang, Crockett to my Columbo, Beano to my Beckett, Captain Birdseye to my Nigella Lawson, Jimmy Osmond to my Jimi Hendrix.

Somehow by a miracle we have stayed together through more differences than sames, through happiness and tragedy and my love for him grows stronger every day.